Why I (re)launched CustomerDiscovery.com in 2024

Many years back I bought this domain and started a blog on it, but ran out of steam because I was launching multiple SaaS products and advising/supporting multiple startups and enterprises with their customer discovery. This time I'm committed to the long haul. It's one of my New Year's resolutions for 2024.

In this post I want to document my "why" for relaunching the site. Partially for my own benefit, and partially so you can decide whether subscribing to my weekly emails is going to be helpful for you (hint: the form to subscribe is at the bottom of this post).

So without further ado, here are my "whys" for relaunching this site:

1. I recently hit a career milestone of 20 years doing customer discovery work and decided it was time to pivot to helping people become great at developing the skill of discovery rather than always doing it for/with them.
2. I constantly see people making mistakes with discovery, regardless of whether they are a first time entrepreneur or a large enterprise with extensive internal discovery capabilities. Despite the difference in size, many discovery mistakes are common to both. My advice could help prevent these mistakes.
3. I run a startup incubator and constantly find myself repeating advice and best practices on customer discovery. I figure it will be easier/faster if I can just point the startups to this site and tell them to subscribe so they can learn about how to do customer discovery well.
4. Despite my 20+ years of experience, I'm not done learning about this topic. There are so many nuances. This is my way of "learning by teaching," and doing so in a very public way. Asking great questions is one of those skills I always want to develop, regardless of whether it's in a customer interview or just talking to friends and family.
5. I want to do "discovery on discovery" and learn what people are doing so I can always understand best practices and even create new tools that help. Building software products for doing better discovery is a passion of mine, and I hope I can develop new ones as a result of learning from this community.
6. I'd like to scale up my impact. While I enjoy solving discovery problems one-to-one or in small group workshops, I want to get what I know out to the world so more people can learn from my experiences and perspective.
7. Networking. I want to meet the people that sign up to get my advice and expand my network. If you subscribe to the weekly newsletter, feel free to reply to them and we can start a conversation. I'll try my best to reply (if I'm not too busy).
8. Some of the advice out there in blog posts and popular books is uninformed (i.e., written by people who aren't actually experts), overly complex (i.e., full of consultant jargon) and/or downright wrong. While there is no "one true way" to do discovery work, I'd like to at least set the record straight on some of the bad advice out there.
9. I hate seeing people make avoidable mistakes. I've witnessed many entrepreneurs drain their 401(k) chasing ideas that didn't work. I've seen people at large enterprises get fired because they botched a new product that cost millions to develop. These mistakes (largely) could have been mitigated by just talking to customers earlier, more often and in the "right" way.
10. Talking to customers isn't easy sometimes. It's a bit like exercise. You know you need to do it for your long-term health, but it can be tough to get started and make it a habit. My hope is that by sharing practical, actionable and concise advice on how to do it that people will both: do it more often, and do it better when they actually do.

Honestly, this post is more for my benefit than yours. I want to revisit this often to remind me of my "why" and get motivated to stay committed to helping people with customer discovery over the long haul.

Regardless, glad to have you along for the journey. Please be sure to subscribe. It gives me the "fuel" to keep posting free advice and resources.